


Your People Will Be My People, and Your God My God

by ladygrey3



Category: Altered Carbon (TV)
Genre: Character Study, Drama, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Implied/Referenced Incest, Jealousy, Murder, Nightmares, Rei Has Problems, Siblings, sad masturbation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-15
Updated: 2019-03-15
Packaged: 2019-11-18 07:42:10
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,895
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18116348
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ladygrey3/pseuds/ladygrey3
Summary: Tak was standing there, talking to her like he knew her. And he said that he wasn’t leaving without her, and he sounded like their father and he sounded like himself, and he sounded like a child whispering to herself in the middle of the night.“Rei,” Nakamura said. “Rei, what the fuck are you doing? Kill him. We need to get out of here.”Rei shot him. It was one of the easier things she had ever done.





	Your People Will Be My People, and Your God My God

After the tenth year, they said, you were supposed to stop dreaming, but Rei never did. It was one of the first things that Nakamura told her, in those first raw and empty days in the warehouse where she spent most of her adolescence. She had always had nightmares, but in the first weeks they were worse than they had ever been. She woke up shaking, gripped with fever, sometimes with sour bile in her mouth. The nightmares themselves were very ordinary things, almost disappointingly unoriginal. Endless re-runs of her mother dying, blood running from her eyes and mouth. Takeshi’s brains smeared across the wet concrete floor like some strange pale fungus. Her father over her and all around her, a suffocating shadow, his iron hands locked around her throat.   
Eventually, of course, it started to affect her performance in the field, which was why Nakamura noticed. She got spotted out on a run, panicked, left a gun behind. It wasn’t a real threat—her fingerprints could not be linked to anything, since legally she no longer existed—but still, it was one less gun. And beyond that, she had quite simply fucked up. Nakamura had made his feelings clear about her fucking up.   
There had to be a punishment, so he punished her, and then afterwards he sat her down and gave her a glass of water. “What the fuck is wrong with you?” he said.   
Rei took a sip, swallowed a sticky mouthful of water and blood. “I can’t sleep,” she replied thickly.   
Nakamura snorted. “Bed not soft enough for you?”  
“I get bad dreams.”  
To Rei’s dull surprise, Nakamura’s wrinkled face grew still at this, as if he were actually listening to her. “It happens,” he said, after a moment. “You just have to ignore them.”  
“But I can’t,” Rei said, and to her horror she felt a hot bubble of tears in her throat. “I can’t ignore it. I can’t sleep.”  
Nakamura examined her. His eyes were black and glossy and opaque as wet rock. He was missing the smallest finger on his left hand, severed just past the first joint. He had done this as a gesture of loyalty; Rei knew that someday, if she managed to stay alive long enough, she would probably have to do the same.   
“It goes away, after a while,” he said. “You stop dreaming.”  
“At all?”  
“More or less.” Nakamura scratched his chin. “So don’t worry about it. You’ll be fine.”  
And ultimately she was fine, but she didn’t stop dreaming. She just got better at managing it. Breathing control, pressure points, a few years of trial and error. She trained herself to move past the nightmares. It wasn’t exactly easy, but it was better than the alternative. Nakamura had made it very clear from the beginning that she, like all the other soldiers, was an investment. He was prepared to put a minimum of effort into her, but if she did not repay him for that effort tenfold, he would get rid of her. It was a simple and unforgiving arithmetic. She would be useful, or she would be dead. And she couldn’t be useful stumbling around in a miserable haze like a walking corpse, missing shots and making mistakes.  
The trick that always worked the best was remembering Tak. When they were little and slept in the same room he had always known when she was having a bad dream. She couldn’t count the number of times she had woken up trembling to see him sitting on the edge of the bed, his hand resting on her shoulder. When she was very small, she would throw herself into his arms and he would hold her until the world felt solid again. Later, when she was no longer as comfortable with casual physical contact, she would just sit next to him. Sometimes she would put her head on his shoulder, or he would run his hand very gently over her hair. Nothing, not even the increasing discomfort she felt in her body as she grew older, could wholly separate her from Tak.   
Nothing except not being on the same planet anymore. That seemed to have done the trick.   
She didn’t stop dreaming, but she learned how to manage it, at the same time as she was learning a whole lot of other new things. How to field-strip and reassemble any weapon they put in front of her. How to break a man’s neck in five movies. How to sew up bullet wounds and set bones, sometimes on herself. It turned out that these were all things that she was good at, and it was satisfying to do them well. Not simply because being good at them meant that she was useful and therefore more or less safe, but on a more basic level; the deep and powerful satisfaction of doing something that other people couldn’t do, and doing it right.   
“You’re one of those awful fucking people who’re just good at things,” Nakamura told her cheerfully. “It’s terrible. You don’t even have to try that hard.”  
Rei nodded respectfully and said nothing. She could not remember her father or mother ever saying anything remotely like that. You’re smart, you’re good at things. Tak was the only person who said things like that. Had been, anyway.   
Nakamura came to like her. He listened when she spoke. Because he liked her, he gave her extra tasks, special ones. She did not particularly like these tasks, but she did them anyway, and if she did them well he smiled at her and told her she was a natural. Sometimes he would give her one of the mints he carried around in his breast pocket and took after every meal, because some woman had told him he had bad breath once. The other soldiers in her training group noticed this and drew away from her, cold and hostile, but it was well worth the security that Nakamura’s favoritism afforded her. The children were transitory. Nakamura was not.   
She knew better than to mistake Nakamura’s preference for love, or even affection. He treated her well because she performed well. His generosity was conditional, like everything was here. And that was fine. She could keep performing well for as long as she had to. If she needed to, she could be nothing but good at her job for the rest of her life.   
She had believed that Tak had loved her, and she had believed it was unconditional. But clearly she had been wrong about that. And the worst part was that she couldn’t even really blame him for it. If she had been able to fight back, to defend herself, he wouldn’t have had to do what he did. She hadn’t been much use to anyone, back then. It wasn’t really a surprise that he had left her. He was just trying to survive.   
And so the upshot of all this, she concluded, was that there was no one who loved her. No one alive, in all the infinite expanse of the universe. It was a strangely fascinating thought: all that space, all that nothing, and not a single living thing in all of it who was thinking about her. She experimented with it, tried to say it aloud in the black emptiness of the nighttime while she lay curled up on her cot.   
“No one loves me,” she whispered.   
For a moment there was nothing. Black air, hollow space. Then a high, hysterical laugh flooded her mouth like hot blood and spilled out into the dark. She clapped both hands over her mouth and lay there paralyzed, her heart frozen. A few awful, airless minutes ticked by. Carefully, she removed her hands from her mouth, let herself breathe. No one had heard. She hadn’t woken anyone up, hadn’t made a nuisance of herself. That was the important thing.   
After that she did not say it aloud again. Clearly it was a dangerous idea. Anything that made her unpredictable to herself was dangerous. She carried it inside her, silent, like shrapnel in a half-healed wound. She became what was required of her and did what she was told. She gained a few scars, lost part of a finger. Stayed alive, although it was a near thing at times. Stayed alive out of nothing but savage, painful spite at everything that had ever tried to destroy her.   
“You’re like a dog,” Nakamura said. He ran his fingers through her hair, calluses catching among the strands. “You’ll do anything for me. You’ll do anything I say.”  
“Yes,” Rei said. She tilted her head into his hand and pushed everything out of her mind, made herself empty, made herself stop thinking about anything at all.   
When Tak showed up again, wearing his stupid CTAC armor and talking in English, the world immediately shifted around him. Staring at him, with her gun in his face, Rei abruptly became aware that all the things that had been important for the past twenty years no longer mattered even a little bit. It was all meaningless now, because Tak was standing there, talking to her like he knew her. And he said that he wasn’t leaving without her, and he sounded like their father and he sounded like himself, and he sounded like a child whispering to herself in the middle of the night.   
“Rei,” Nakamura said. “Rei, what the fuck are you doing? Kill him. We need to get out of here.”  
Rei shot him. It was one of the easier things she had ever done. 

In the forest there was no privacy, and as such one of the very first facts Rei observed about Quellcrist Falconer was that she had very nice breasts. It wasn’t the sort of thing she made a point of noticing, but in one of the early days she stumbled across Quell bathing in the river outside of camp and it was sort of unavoidably obvious. They were big and round and pointed in opposite directions.  
Rei knew that her own breasts were basically nonexistent. For the first time in a long while, this fact bothered her a little. She wondered if that was a good or bad sign.   
“Hello, Rei,” said Quell. She did not look up from the surface of the river.   
“Hey,” Rei replied. She had not noticed Quell noticing her. That was new, too, and she felt sure that it wasn’t good.   
Quell was quiet for a little while. She had a rag in one hand, which she dipped in the water and scrubbed across her left arm.   
“You can come in, if you want,” she said.  
“That’s okay,” said Rei, who had in fact come to the river to wash, but had no intention of getting closer to Quell than she absolutely had to.   
Quell made a fluid motion with her shoulders that was not quite a shrug. There was a long, bleached, scar running most of the way down her back. She looked very strong; muscles slid and gathered across her shoulders. Rei decided that Quell might be physically more powerful than she was, but that she could probably still take her.   
“You seem like you’re settling in well,” Quell said. Like the not-shrug, it was not exactly a question, but it wasn’t really anything other than a question either.   
“I’m doing alright,” Rei replied. “I’m adaptable.”  
“Yes,” Quell said. “I imagine you are.”  
She sank abruptly and her head vanished smoothly below the surface of the water. A moment later she emerged like a cresting dolphin, diamond ribbons of water streaming off her face and her endless hair. She said something indistinct.   
“What?” Rei asked.   
Quell shook her hair out, throwing a fan of drops back into the water. “Your finger,” she said. “You were yakuza.”  
Rei did not know precisely how to respond to that. “For a little while,” she said after a moment.   
“Why did you leave?”  
Rei bit the inside of her cheek and weighed her words. “It wasn’t exactly voluntary,” she said carefully. “And blood’s thicker than water, as they say.”  
“Takeshi,” Quell said. Her voice was mild and even.   
“Yes,” Rei said. “Takeshi.” She did not entirely keep the cold, mocking lilt out of her tone as she said his name. She wasn’t really trying very hard to keep it out.   
Quell twisted her thick rope of hair over her shoulder. “Well,” she said briskly, after a moment. “I’m glad you’re here. We need more people like you.”  
“People like me?”  
Quell glanced over at her, smiling an opaque smile. She really was dazzlingly beautiful. “People who know how to make the best of a bad situation,” she said.   
Rei would reflect later that this was perhaps the moment when she first began to hate Quell. 

Tak had also noticed that Quell had nice tits. Rei could tell by the way that he pointedly avoided ever looking at them. It had been twenty years of radio silence, but he hadn’t really changed much. Rei observed with deep satisfaction that she could still read everything about him.   
She knew, for instance, that he had liked Quell from the moment he met her, even when she was snarling and clawing at him like a wet cat. And it was really so fucking typical. Tak could never like a woman who didn’t enjoy hurting him, at least a little bit. Quell could beat him bloody in training, call him a murderer and a machine, and he would only want her more for it. It was all rather pathetic, but hardly surprising. Taking punishment had always been what Tak was best at.  
She also knew that she bore a pretty significant resemblance to their mother, now that she was an adult, and it made Tak visibly uncomfortable. It was more funny than anything. She figured it was her prerogative as a younger sibling to mess with him, and she had twenty years’ worth of casual psychological torture to get in. So she experimented a little, just for fun; wore her hair down like their mother used to do, picked up expressions or tics that she dimly remembered from the painful blur of childhood. Observed which things hurt Tak the most, made him stiff or angry or distant.   
The thing about Tak was that he was basically just a simple person, when you got down to it. He wanted more than anything to feel like he was a good man. That made him predictable, and therefore weak. It was the same way that he had always been, and Rei loved him for it. She understood—in an intellectual sense—that it wasn’t supposed to be this fun to hurt someone you loved, but that clearly didn’t apply for her and Tak. Wasn’t it what their family had always done? And besides, Tak had done far worse to her.   
But she forgave him, of course. She would always forgive him, for anything, as long as he stayed. He was hers now, and she was his. She knew with a perfect cold certainty that she would do absolutely anything to keep him with her. Knew it like she knew the pull of gravity, the rhythm of day and night. Perhaps the fact should have frightened her, but it didn’t, not really. She had always known that she was capable of basically anything. At least now she would be doing it for a reason that she had chosen herself.   
Her life had been simple before, and it was simple now. In the past, everything she did and was had been for the sole and specific purpose of keeping her alive. Now it was the same, except that it was all about Tak. Survival came second. Everything came second.   
Nobody loves me. She had been so stupid. Nobody loves me. But Tak had been out there the whole time, somewhere in the dark, loving her and trying to find his way back to her. It had just taken him a little while, but that wasn’t a problem. They had time now. Once she managed to disentangle them from these people and their pointless, self-righteous little crusade, they would have all the time they could ever need. 

“Unity is all we have,” Quell said. “They have the money. They have the numbers. They have the guns. But we have each other. Every part of every one of us, always. Unity is the one thing we have that they don’t, and it is the only thing that will save us. It is the only way to change everything.”  
As it turned out, the process of disentanglement wasn’t quite as easy as Rei had assumed it would be.   
Quell was prone to this particular stunt—turning every interaction into an opportunity for a florid, inspirational sermon. After a while they all started to run together. She was unquestionably a compelling speaker, all burning eyes and a voice like breaking glass, but after you had heard one speech about the Evils of Stack Technology you had sort of heard them all, in Rei’s opinion. The performance was entertaining, but the content lacked something in the way of creativity.   
Quell, of course, took all of her speeches very seriously. So did Takeshi. He sat in the mud, watching her with a look on his face that Rei did not know. She had thought that she had seen every one of Tai’s expressions, every twist of emotion that had ever crossed his face. But this one was new. It was a look like the terrible, searing way the sunlight stick the surface of the river in the morning. It was a look like an open wound. Sometimes when he was watching her speak, he would smile this quiet little smile, and it was awful to look at, like staring at the sun.   
Initially Rei tried to ignore it. He wasn’t used to life outside CTAC, and Quell was beautiful and charismatic. It was only natural for him to fixate on her a little. But no living woman could ever actually live up to the image Quell had constructed for herself. She would fuck up, and Tak would lose interest in her, and he and Rei could leave and find somewhere nice to live. Besides, Quell hated him.   
Except the thing was that she didn’t, not anymore. Initially it had all been imperialist, animal, butcher, but all that seemed to just ebb away after a little while, as if Quell couldn’t manage to sustain her righteous rage in the face of an actual human person who was clearly trying his best to help her. For a little while Rei could write it off as unwilling respect for Tak’s genuine expertise, but respect only went so far. Eventually you had to start calling it something else.   
In the most basic way, Tak was the same. He was a little colder and a little more distant and a lot better at killing people, but he still wanted the same things he always had. And Rei knew him, and she knew exactly which parts of Quell attracted him, and she knew when things started to slide from physical interest and mutual appreciation to something else. She felt it like the earth shifting beneath her feet.   
She remembered when she was a child, and they had told her he left you. He’s with CTAC now. You’ll never see him again. In some way she had felt then like she had stopped existing. Gravity had lost its hold on her and she had spun out into the dark like a planet dropping out of orbit, disintegrating, losing herself molecule by molecule. She remembered that feeling very clearly.   
She remembered it particularly the day that she saw Tak on the bank of the river, with Quell sitting next to him. They were speaking to each other very quietly, their voices dulled by the rush of the water. They were so close to each other that from a distance they became one soft dark blur against the glare of the setting sun. Quell was saying something, and Tak laughed, and Rei saw that it was a real laugh, one of the sharp broken laughs that always made him seem a little surprised at his own amusement. The ends of her long braids trailed over the back of his hand. Rei watched as he turned his hand over and touched her hair, running it between his fingers with an exquisite gentleness, as if it were holy. Quell glanced down at his hand, smiling. Her face was illuminated with a soft, silent radiance.   
She slid her braid out of his grasp and placed her hand in his. She leaned forward and kissed him. He did not respond for a moment, but then he closed his eyes and his other hand lifted to slide behind her head. She moved closer to him. He ran his fingers over the back of her neck, holding onto her like she was the only real thing in the world.   
There was a shrill drone in the back of Rei’s head. White static floated across her vision. She closed her eyes and opened them and they were still there and Quell was still kissing him. A hot wave of dizziness went through her whole body. The world faded around the edges. She turned around and went back towards the camp. A little ways outside of it, she stopped under a pine tree, sat down, and put her hands over her face.   
A part of her was still fairly sure that this couldn’t be real. A serene voice somewhere in her head, saying this isn’t really happening. This is surely not happening. This voice was not useful to her and she ignored it. It was all real. The soft carpet of pine needles was real, her crazed heartbeat was real, Tai’s hand sliding so carefully behind Quell’s head was real. Everything adding up to one inescapable reality.   
She became aware of a pain in her stomach. It felt like she had swallowed bleach. It squirmed and gnawed at her insides. She did not know what it was or how to get it out of her. It was a little like anger but it hurt more than anger did, and when she thought about the soft brightness on Quell’s face it flooded into her head as if it would blind her or burn out her brain.   
She realized that this was probably jealousy. She hadn’t felt anything like this since she was a child. It was awful; it felt like it might actually kill her. She hit herself in the stomach with the vague idea that she might make herself vomit it up, but it just hurt her ribs. She considered whether or not it was possible to physically die from feeling this way.   
He would have stopped kissing her by now. He would be touching her, the way you were meant to touch people you loved. Supposedly it was meant to be different from the normal touching for the sake of touching. Rei couldn’t imagine how. It was all the same stuff, no matter how you felt about the other person. Maybe it went slower, or something like that. She tried to imagine what it would be like to be touched by someone who actually wanted her. Someone she trusted. But she just ended up thinking about Nakamura, the same way she always did, and the only person she had ever really trusted was down on the back of the river and definitely not thinking about her right now.   
He had probably taken her sweat-stained shirt off and seen the scar on her back. Maybe he would run his fingers over it, like he had done with her hair, or kiss the bleached skin. He would be very gentle with her, even though there was no way he could do her any real harm if he tried. Rei could see them in her head with the terrible clarity of a nightmare. She could see his mouth pressing against Quell’s pretty face and pretty breasts, see Quell laughing and moaning. When she let him fuck her, he would avoid her gaze at first, but she would touch his face and make him look at her. She would want him to meet her eyes and see on her face how he made her feel.   
An awful wet stinging rose up Rei’s throat. Furiously, she shoved her hand under the waistband of her jeans. She dug her knuckles between her legs, trying to find something that felt good. But mostly it just hurt. It felt wet, like she was bleeding. She knew that was supposed to mean something, but all she could really feel was a sort of sick burning. An ugliness.   
The heat in her throat rushed upwards. She bit into the skin of her other forearm and managed to swallow the tears. Her teeth broke the skin. She tasted the bright, familiar bitterness of blood in her mouth. She took her hand out of her underwear and lay back against the tree trunk.   
She understood that she had been taking comfort in a fact that meant nothing. She had told herself, over and over, that Tak had not changed; that he was still the person she loved. What she had failed to understand was that she was no longer the person that he had loved. It hadn’t been too late for him. He was still mostly human, somehow. He had escaped CTAC before they could take away the part of him that let him fall in love and really believe in things. But by the time he got to her, she had already changed too much. Something in her was broken now, or gone. And if he knew who she was now, she did not know if he would still love her.   
Quell was different. Quell, unburdened by familial guilt or nostalgia, had already seen and recognized what Rei was. She had tried to act like Rei could be somehow good or useful nonetheless, but she still knew.   
If this kept going, Tak would leave her, or he would die. Or both. She knew this with a certainty that was almost calming. If she let him do this, it would be the end of both them.   
She understood her father better now. She understood what it meant to love someone so much that you had to hurt them. And she understood that she had been wrong when she had thought of him as raging and uncontrolled, like a rabid animal. He must have been calm when he decided to hurt them. She felt very calm right now, and she knew that she was preparing to hurt Tak in a far worse way than their father ever had.   
It would be simple enough. CTAC wanted Quell more than just about anything, certainly more than they wanted Rei or Tak. With a little maneuvering, she could probably get basically whatever she wanted from them. And Tak, the deserter, would have no way of figuring it out. He might even blame himself for it, which would certainly make him easier to manage. She’d tell him eventually, of course, but he’d need a little time to forget Quell first. Rei would help him along, find things to help distract him. With a little money and some backup bodies, they could do anything he liked.   
It was only fair, really. He had always taken care of her, through those long bloody years that she remembered only vaguely now. It was her turn to take care of him. She wouldn’t be her mother, passively observing as someone she loved was torn apart. She was stronger. She could protect Takeshi. She could even protect him from the things he thought he wanted.   
She sat up under the tree. The air smelled sharply of pine, and more delicately of salt—from tears, or blood, or sex. High above, the sun was melting down towards the bright wire of the horizon. She became aware that she was no longer upset. The jealousy still snarled and spat in her gut, but she could ignore it now. She was quite calm. Perhaps even happy, a little. The world felt very clear and wide-awake, and the pine needles were soft. She slid her hand into them, let them slip through her fingers.   
She had changed so much already. Surely she could keep changing, if she had to. She could make herself into anyone and everyone that Tak needed; sister, best friend, mother, wife. He would be safe with her in a way that he never would be with anyone else. And eventually he would see that. He wasn’t stupid.   
The bark of the tree was cool against her back. They would probably have finished up now, down by the lake. They would be going back to camp, which she should probably do as well. She decided to allow herself just a moment of quiet before that. Before she had to go to work again.   
He hadn’t saved her, but that was okay. She forgave him for that, like she always would. And now she could save him. If he needed her to, she would keep saving him forever, until there were no other people left in the universe to keep them apart.

**Author's Note:**

> she is, in fact, the actual worst, but I love her


End file.
